Australia's News Media and Digital Platform Mandatory Bargaining Code was a step towards compelling digital platforms to pay publishers for content, but represents a missed opportunity. This report sets out recommendations for how the Code could have matched its original ambition in securing a fair and competitive internet.

Disinformation has fundamentally altered the functioning of our public square and our democracy. Increasingly, fair and factual debate is a rarity. The experiment outlined in this report sought to test Facebook’s ad review system by attempting to approve advertisements that explicitly promoted election disinformation narratives that were common in the last US election.

This publication documents a timeline of major events over the course of Facebook’s history that demonstrate the unprecedented power the platform wields over politics and information systems globally. The authors argue that Australia remains vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, and does not have effective safeguards to shield the upcoming federal election from Facebook’s influence.